Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Associate Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A Republican Senator walks into a bar and goes on and on about how bad the deficit is, and how much money the “Democrat” Congress has been spending and how President Obama has run up all this debt. The GOP Senator is so incensed about the state of the federal budget that he votes against extending unemployment benefits, even though the unemployment rate is at 9.5 percent. $33 billion, says the senator, is just too much to spend on the millions of people who are pounding the pavement looking for work.

It’s not a particularly funny joke, because, sadly, it’s not a joke at all. This is the position of the Republican party. Senate Republicans unanimously opposed extending jobless aid one day, citing concern over the deficit, but then turn right around and push for huge tax cuts for the very richest people in the country, which would cost more than 20 times as much.

I’ll never understand how a Senator can feign such anxiety about the deficit one minute, push for budget busting tax cuts the next and still keep a straight face. I’ll also never understand how they keep getting away with it.

Like ThinkProgress on Facebook

By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.